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She stepped inside, the last bags pressing against her as if they carried not just clothing but weeks of displacement, the absence of her own walls, the fracture of space she had fled from. Darkness clung to the corners, the curtains drawn tight as though they were guarding her from every shadow she imagined moving behind them, and the emptiness of the bleumarine room stretched before her, almost unfamiliar in its stillness. She felt the pulse of her anxiety tighten along her spine, a slow, insistent thrum as she let her gaze travel over shapes and angles she had once known intimately, now alien and menacing in their quiet.
Spencer came up behind her, carrying the last bags with a careful steadiness that seemed to anchor him to the real, placing them by the door where she lingered, fixed and silent, her eyes flicking over the darkness in a calculation that belied the tremor beneath.
"This place is darker than I remember," he murmured, his voice holding a note of concern that Eleanor didn't immediately register. His hand brushed against the wall near the door, searching for the outlet, and pressed sharply. Light flooded the apartment, the sudden brightness cutting into the shadows she had carried inside her mind, forcing her pupils to contract sharply, forcing her to blink, forcing her awareness to collide violently with the reality she had tried to reclaim.
Spencer adjusted the bags again and stepped beside her on the way to the bedroom, glancing at her as if weighing whether to interrupt her thoughts. "Are you okay?"
The words startled her, tugging her awareness back from the edges where her imagination and memory had intertwined with every corner, every closed curtain. She turned her head towards him, confusion flaring across her face, the quiet shock of returning to a place she had left feeling foreign pressing into her bones.
"We can always go back to mine. You don't have to stay here," he said, measured, the weight of understanding in his tone, aware without needing to name it that her absence had been compelled by something far beyond ordinary fear.
Her lips parted slightly, voice low and shaky as if the act of speech itself reminded her she was in the apartment she had once abandoned. "No, this is my home. What are you talking about?" She moved away from him, crossing towards the bedroom, deliberate in her steps despite the tremor under her skin, each motion a negotiation with the anxieties that had kept her away, where ghosts of her own making had claimed presence for days without end.
Spencer remained behind, the echo of his gaze lingering, a silent acknowledgment of the vigilance he started carrying around her these days, the patient proximity he offered without insistence, the quiet presence that had always been her tether to what she needed to believe was real.
